Tim Draper, a well-known Silicon Valley venture capitalist and founding partner of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, was the sole winner in the U.S. Marshals Service’s auction of 30,000 bitcoins that were seized as part of the October Silk Road bust, according to a post on the blog of Vaurum, a bitcoin exchange service in which Draper is an investor.

“We’re delighted to announce that Tim Draper has won the U.S. Marshals bitcoin auction and is partnering with Vaurum to provide bitcoin liquidity in emerging markets,” the post states.

Draper was not immediately available for comment. Avish Bhama, CEO of Vaurum, confirmed the news via email but did not disclose details of Draper’s bid.

Assuming he bid in the range of the $580 market price for bitcoin on the day of the auction, last Friday, the bid would’ve been for roughly $17 million. But it’s possible, even likely, that he bid higher.

The identity of the winner has been a source of keen interest all week, since the auction closed on Friday. The Marshals Service started notifying the bidders on Monday of the results. High profile bidders like Barry Silbert of SecondMarket and Pantera Capital confirmed that they did not win. Bitcoin Shop, another bidder, also confirmed it didn’t win. Other bidders, like Coinbase and the Winklevoss Twins, declined to comment.

On Tuesday, the Marshals announced that there was one winning bidder. It declined to name the winner.

Draper was part of a group that included Battery Ventures and former AOL chief executive Steve Case that invested $4 million in Vaurum in May. The company went through the VC accelerator program Boost VC, run by Draper’s son, Adam Draper.

Draper won the auction independently, Bhama said. He is not only an investor, he is a customer of Vaurum as well, which is where the coins will be held. “Our partnership will allow us to use the coins to provide liquidity to our exchanges in emerging markets,” Bhama said.

Vaurum explained how the partnership came about in its post:

Vaurum was incubated by Boost last summer which is where we met Adam Draper and Tim Draper, who are both early investors in us. Collectively, we’ve been brainstorming to come up with new ways to help grow global bitcoin adoption, and what we came up with is a way to leverage our exchanges and utilize the auctioned pool of bitcoins, as well as market making strategies, to help provide liquidity in these underserved markets.

Since trading around $580 on Friday, bitcoins prices have been rising, trading on Wednesday at $642, according to CoinDesk, as the market anticipated a strong spate of bids, showing demand from venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and investors alike.

The coins auctioned off came from servers maintained by Silk Road, a notorious online drug marketplace that utilized bitcoin as its payment system, which the feds busted in October. The Marshals are still holding onto another 110,000 bitcoins that were maintained on the personal computer of Ross Ulbricht, the site’s alleged mastermind, who was arrested and is awaiting trial.